Saturday, 16 June 2012

Navajo Weavers At Hubbel Trading Post, the First Such Post on the Navajo Reservation, Ganado County, Arizona:photo by Terry Eiler for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, May 1972 (National Archives and Records Administration)

Whatever man makes and makes it live
lives because of the life put into it.A yard of India muslin is alive with Hindu life.And a Navajo woman, weaving her rug in the pattern of her dreammust run the pattern out in a little break at the endso that her soul can come out, back to her.

But in the odd pattern, like snake marks on the sandit leaves its trail.

Spinning wool into yarn to be used in Navajo rug weaving, Southern Navajo Agency: photographer unknown, 1933 (Department of the Interior/Bureau of Indian Affairs/National Archives and Records Administration)

Navajo women weaving one of the very
large rugs for which Southern Navajo (Ganado district) Indians are
famous, Southern Navajo Agency: photographer unknown, 1933 (Department of the Interior/Bureau of Indian Affairs/National Archives and Records Administration)

Blanket weaver -- Navaho: photo by Edward W. Curtis (1868-1952), fromThe Apache; The Jicarillas; The Navaho [portfolio], Seattle, 1907 [Curtis caption: "The
Navaho-land blanket looms are in evidence everywhere. In the winter
months they are set up in the hogans, but during the summer they are
erected outdoors under an improvised shelter, or, as in this case,
beneath a tree. The simplicity of the loom and its product are here
clearly shown, pictured in the early morning light under a large
cottonwood."] (Northwestern University Library/Library of Congress)

Blanket weavers. Aboriginal life among the Navajoe Indians. Near old Fort Defiance, New Mexico: photo by Thomas H. O'Sullivan (1840-1882), 1873 (Library of Congress)

Navajo woman at loom weaving a blanket. A wooden
crate that reads: "Charles Unsweetened Evaporated Milk" is near the
woman. A herd of sheep walk on a ledge nearby. A stone and earth hogan
is near the sheep: photo by William M. Pennington, between 1904 and 1932, from John Stewart MacCrary: "'Feel' of the desert", in The Desert Magazine, January 1940 (Library of Congress/ Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library)

Navajo Rug Weaving: Kodachrome photo by Ray Manley, n.d ; original postcard caption: "From high in the sheep ranges of the Indian country come these pure
wool masterpieces of the Navajo's rug weaving skill.Traditional Navajo weaving used upright looms with no moving parts.
Support poles were traditionally constructed of wood although steel
pipe is more common today. The artisan sits on the floor during
weaving and wraps the finished portion of fabric underneath the loom
as it grows. The average weaver takes anywhere from 2 months to many
years to finish a single rug"; image by by Brenda (9teen87), 9 September 2011

Navajo girls learn first to weave by observation, near Navajo Mountain, Utah: photo by John Collier, 1948; image by John Collier, Junior, 11 November 2006

Navajo women weave a rug at the Hubbel Trading Post, first trading post on the Navajo Reservation: photo by Terry Eiler for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, May 1972 (National Archives and Records Administration)

The collective element in the cultural tradition that permits the individual to make things in which a bit of the individual soul is invested, even as the whole is reaffirmed -- I think Lawrence sussed out a bit of that, from his usual intense anxious distance of interested observation, in seeing such weavings made.

Not that Lawrence was unaware of what tourism had done to the indigenous cultures of the Southwest: "Just a show! The south-west is the great playground of the white American. The desert isn't good for anything else. But it does make a fine national playground. And the Indian, with his long hair and his bits of pottery and blankets and clumsy home-made trinkets, he's a wonderful live toy to play with." (DHL to Willard Johnson, "Just back from the snake dance", Questa, New Mexico, late August 1924)

The trail of the tail of a tale in the sand has the loops and turnings and returnings of a life.

Lawrence's own alas not a very long one, but still with its particular twists that made the art possible, however tormented at times the life.

The honesty. The caring and not caring. The not by your leave and the in your face.

Perhaps one or two of those who have been hanging about this dry arroyo will have wondered whether the John Collier who took the penultimate photo here might possibly be one and the same with the John Collier who made some of the most striking images ever made of the part of New Mexico where Lawrence had his extended sojourn. A patch of Earth which is indeed a church in the sky.

Yes, he's always involving the living moral individual in the collective twistings of the tail, and investing value on the one hand (in the not "civilized") and detecting its depletion and indeed evanishment on the other (in/from the way things are).

How inconvenient. This sort of thing was never going to do for the tenured latterday avantgardistas. You'd naturally not want to invest your "texts" with your career ambitions too openly, assuming those are what passes for your values. Small wonder Lawrence no longer exists, in an age dedicated to its comforts his uncomfortableness was always going to cause discomfort.

Poetry takes what is surrounding and shapes it, using what's available--sticks, animal pelts, rocks for weight. Some poems are like math, like geometry but still rough, scratchy. Those are the desert poems. You may ask, what is all this color about, these shapes? Are they learned or made up, all the while watching for wolves, for anything changing.It was a great reliefwhen I could goto the loomand someone elsehad to watch the kids.I had switched jobswith my manin order to survive.

Not till the railroads came in the Eighties, bringing aniline dyes among other bloody additives, could the bright red colours ("eyedazzlers") be obtained.

Some trace the geometries back to octagonal designs from the weavers of the Caucasus. Abstractions come from and in turn speak back to pattern recognition centres in the mind that are probably universal.

Don Lorenzo Hubbell (he of the trading post, top and bottom images), by the way, was a half Spanish half Anglo trader whom the Navajo weavers evidently trusted a great deal. He was the first white man to be buried on Navajo lands.

Poor Coronado, misled by Friar Marcos de Niza about Cibola which turned out to be nothing but a small development of modest Zuni pueblos, not a pot of gold, and by the lying Sioux or Pawnee named the Turk, about Quivira, where there turned out to be only a lot of naked Indians, and less precious metal than was already in Coronado's shiny hat.

The questions about Quivira were always answeredby pointing to the north.

The march Coronado’s army made in 1541brought him there—Quivira was a village of Wichita Indian teepees.

Coronado writes to the King October 20, “…some Indians who were natives of other provinces beyond these had told me that in their country there were much larger villages and better houses than those of the natives of this country, and they had lords who ruled them, who were served with dishes made of gold, and other very magnificent things; and although, as I wrote your majesty, I did not believe it before I had set eyes on it, because it was the report of Indians and given for the most part by means of signs.”

It is mystifying that the natives gave Coronadoa piece of copper or gold he could hang around his neck—the guides confessed they had led him on,hoping they and their horses would starve on the plains.I get hungry reading about it.how there were grapesalong some streams

The poem, the photos and the comments invariably weave their own tapestry; in this one, I can see women like this one. Together with their looms, they were permanent fixtures of every Greek household not so very long ago.

Dear TC: One of the first books I produced during my time at the Smithsonian's Indian museum was called Woven by the Grandmothers: 19th-Century Navajo Textiles from the National Museum of the American Indian; it included many beautiful works, similar to those you've posted here. One contributor wrote about "the spirit line": "If a weaver weaves a perfect rug, she makes a little mistake on purpose---an imperfection...so the rug will not be perfect." So as not to offend the divine. I wish I had known about Lawrence's poem back then, but thanks for turning me on to it now.

Unknown, I had that same feeling with the rugs. Abstraction in art comes from the mind and the soul. Money makes it fly back to the New York art gallery and the auction house.

Terry, this beautiful passage encompasses (and perhaps extends) the point of Lawrence's poem:

"One contributor wrote about 'the spirit line': 'If a weaver weaves a perfect rug, she makes a little mistake on purpose---an imperfection...so the rug will not be perfect.' So as not to offend the divine."